July 21, 2006 It looks kinda like a Lotus Elise, tops 130 mph, has a range of 250 miles on a single charge, and is capable of 0-60 mph in about four seconds. Those are impressive figures and put it in the supercar acceleration class but the biggest thing the new electric Tesla Roadster which was unveiled overnight has going for it is cred. The kinda cred that comes when names like Elon Musk (PayPal founder and Tesla Chairman), Jeff Skoll (eBay), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google) invest and when California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger calls past for a photo session. The kind of cred that earned it the headline such as “Electric sports car ready to challenge Porsche?” in C/NET and lots of ink in highly credible magazines such as Newsweek, Red Herring, Business Week and Wired before anyone knew anything about their product other than that it was an electric sports car. The superstar team seems to have lived up to the hype though as the Tesla Roadster is impressive (see details inside). Deliveries of the Tesla Roadster are expected to begin mid-2007 and though no price has yet been announced for the vehicle, the indications are that it’ll run somewhere between the US$80,000 of the Tango and the US$120,000 of the Hybrid Technologies Mullen GT and somewhat less than the US$580,000 of the Venturi Fetish.